The present invention relates to estimating human shape and pose from images where the shape and pose is in two dimensions. The present invention also relates to modeling clothing on 2D models of the human body, and more particularly to accurately estimate body shape underneath clothing and to recognize the type of clothing worn by a person.
The following discussion of related art is provided to assist the reader in understanding the advantages of the invention, and is not to be construed as an admission that this related art is prior art to this invention.
Three dimensional (3D) models of the human body have been widely reported and have become sophisticated and highly detailed, with the ability to accurately model human shapes and poses. Disadvantageously, however, they are complex and computationally intensive. Additionally, the estimation of such models from a single, monocular, image is ambiguous and may require sophisticated optical scanning methods for data acquisition.
Conversely, two-dimensional (2D) models of the human body are popular due to their representational and computational simplicity. Existing models include articulated pictorial structures models, active shape models (or point distribution models), parameterized non-rigid templates, and silhouette models. However, most 2D articulated person models have focused on estimating human pose and have ignored body shape.
It would therefore be desirable and advantageous to address this problem and to obviate other prior art shortcomings by developing models that explicitly represent human shape with contours and, furthermore, represent non-rigid human shape and pose. Such a representation enables addressing the issue of body shape recognition, a task that is beyond the scope of traditional 2D models. It would also be desirable and advantageous to explicitly model how clothing influences human shape based the 2D human shape model. It would also be desirable and advantageous to be able to predict 3D body shape from silhouettes in one or several 2D uncalibrated images.